A.M. Links: 54% of Florida Without Power After Hurricane Irma, North Korea Condemns U.N. Sanctions, Mexico Earthquake Death Toll Climbs to 96

Members of Donald Trump's legal team reportedly advised the president that Jared Kushner should step down from his role in the White House over concerns raised by the Russia investigation.

More than 54 percent of Florida households have no electricity in the wake of Hurricane Irma.

Schools have reopened in Houston, Texas. They have been closed for the past two weeks due to Hurricane Harvey.

North Korea is condemning a new U.N. Security Council resolution imposing sanctions on the country for its recent nuclear tests.

"Russian operatives hiding behind false identities used Facebook's event management tool to remotely organize and promote political protests in the U.S., including an August 2016 anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rally in Idaho."

The death toll from last week's 8.1-magnitude earthquake in Mexico has climbed to 96.

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For those curious about what the “enhanced” pat-down involves, I had a first-hand experience (no pun intended) Sunday evening September 10 in the Kansas City airport. (This is going exactly where you think it’s going, so feel free to stop reading right now.)

After going through a metal detector in the TSA-Pre security line, I was randomly selected to see if a machine would detect explosives on my hands. My palms were swabbed and the machine detected explosives, even though I had not recently handled a gun, flammable liquids, or any sort of explosives. Another airline passenger told me the same machine had detected explosives on the hands of another passenger who had gone through the line minutes before I did.

So what precisely does the “enhanced” pat-down seem to entail, you ask?

Well, since you asked, the agent runs his hand inside a passenger’s waistband and also runs his hand up the back of each leg until he “meets resistance” and then does the same from the front of each leg. And then the TSA agent swipes the front of his hands 3 or 4 times right over the zipper area of one’s Gap Outlet comfort-stretch khakis. That last part was the most unpleasant.

There are complex questions involved in this, but where the energy infrastructure is concerned, there is one fairly obvious solution: more. More pipelines, more refineries, more generating capacity, more nuclear plants, more production. This is not a call for a gigantic federal infrastructure project or a five-year plan. It is a call to let markets work. The United States is blessed with enormous stores of oil, natural gas, coal, and other energy resources, but we do not make nearly as extensive or efficient use of them as we could. The Trump administration, especially EPA chief Scott Pruitt, deserves some credit for taking baby steps in the right direction, for example by approving the Keystone XL pipeline. But there is much more to be done, from building pipelines to splitting uranium atoms, and the regulatory apparatus remains a critical obstacle.

Can we handle a couple of hurricanes? Sure. But the world contains uglier truths and wilder dangers ? and the world knows where we live. In 2001, 19 misfits with box-cutters changed the course of world history and showed us that we were by no means prepared for the future ? or even for the here and now. A little bit of weather can seriously disrupt Americans’ ability to provide themselves with food, fuel, and the other necessities of life. There are worse things than the weather, and we’d better get ready for them.

Because yeah, Houstonians definitely have too much value tied up in housing right now, they should for sure pony up a little extra for the privilege of owning a quarter million dollar garbage dump for soaked drywall.

A new video has emerged showing the 75-year-old jumping out of his limo and turning traffic cop, as he forcefully directs cars out of a line of traffic which had built up behind a tunnel following a car accident.

The boy’s mother opened the his Kik social messaging app on his phone last week and found Figueroa’s sick messages to him, according to a police report cited by the Orlando Sentinel.

“I want to have sex with you,” she told him in one message inviting him to her 21st birthday party, investigators said.

“OK IDC,” the boy replied, using a shorthand for “I don’t care.”

Figueroa told the boy nobody else would be home during the party, according to police. She began making advances on him in February and kept telling him that she liked him, the boy told police. Investigators believe she sent him 15 nude or racy photos.

When questioned what role ‘Samantha’ has in their family Arran said that she would sit on the sofa with his two children and they were happy to talk with it as normal.

Holly was disgusted asking: ‘But at some point they are going to know eventually that daddy has sex with Samantha and she isn’t mummy. Is that not a bit strange?’

Repeatedly touching the doll’s knee and arm throughout, Arran denied that it wasn’t ‘strange’ and defended the existence of the doll claiming that it was there to ‘help people’ rather than ‘replace women’.

Arran’s wife, Hannah Nguyen, 38, confirmed she was more than happy for the doll to join them in bed revealing that she had even had a threesome with it.

However, television psychologist Emma Kenny slammed the idea of sex doll for ‘objectifying’ and ‘commercialising’ women’s bodies.

She said that ‘it wasn’t acceptable or healthy’ to use the technology in the way that it can replace relationships with simulation.

n Sunday evening, gay website Towleroad tweeted out a link to its coverage of an Entertainment Weekly post featuring Hammer reading five minutes of the Andre Aciman novel on which the film is based for a new audio book. The link prompted conservative gay author Chad Felix Green to reply to the tweet with a criticism of the film’s subject matter. He posted: “24 year old man. 17 year old boy. Stop.” (Underage gay sex is something Green has written about in the past; as a HuffPost contributor, he published What Happens When Men Have Sex with Teenage Boys in February of this year.)

Later that night, Woods noticed Green’s tweet and chimed in on the film, writing, “As they quietly chip away the last barriers of decency. #NAMBLA” The hashtag refers to the controversial North American Man/Boy Love Association, which is a pedophilia advocacy organization. (The age of consent in California is 18; in Italy where the film is set, it is 14.)

Monday morning, Hammer, 31, responded to Woods’ tweet by condemning the actor for dating younger women, writing, “Didn’t you date a 19 year old when you were 60…….?’

According to multiple reports, Woods started dating his current girlfriend Kristen Bauguess, in 2013 when she was 20 years old and he was 66 years old. (Woods turned 70 on April 18.) Before Bauguess, he was in a relationship with a woman named Ashley Madison, whom he reportedly started dating when he was 60 and she was either 19 or 20 years old.

Later Monday, Tamblyn, 34, entered the conversation by accusing Woods of hitting on her when she was just a teenager. “James Woods tried to pick me and my friend up at a restaurant once,” the actress wrote on Twitter. “He wanted to take us to Vegas. ‘I’m 16’ I said. ‘Even better’ he said.”

Members of Donald Trump’s legal team reportedly advised the president that Jared Kushner should step down from his role in the White House over concerns raised by the Russia investigation.

The paper reported that some of Trump’s lawyers were largely concerned with the fact that Kushner had the most interaction with Russians, some of whom are being investigated, while on the campaign and during the transition. Lawyers also noted that Kushner failed to accurately report his contact with foreign officials when applying for his security clearance, according to the Wall Street Journal’s report.

He eventually updated his disclosure forms six months later. Jeepers creepers.

“Although 48 people clicked that they were “interested” in the protest, only four said they went to City Council Chambers that day, according to the event page, possibly because it was a Saturday and the Council was not in session. It is also possible to claim attendance on Facebook at an event that didn’t exist. Some of the profiles of interested rallygoers listed themselves as Twin Falls residents.”

In the book, Clinton manages to work in references to both Game of Thrones and The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel that is now a hit Hulu drama. Because Clinton is down with the kids.

“Crowds at Trump rallies called for my imprisonment more times than I can count,” Clinton writes. “They shouted, ‘Guilty! Guilty!’ like the religious zealots in Game of Thrones chanting ‘Shame! Shame!’ while Cersei Lannister walked back to the Red Keep.”

Clinton continues in the book that “it’s not easy for a woman in politics” but feels she was unfairly vilified. “What in the world was this?” she writes in a passage shared on Twitter. “I’ve been in politics for a long time, but I was taken aback by the flood of hatred that only seemed to grow as we got closer to Election Day.

“I had left the State Department one of the most admired public servants in America. Now people seemed to think I was evil. Not just ‘not my cup of tea’ but evil. It was flabbergasting and frightening.”

The politician also refers to Atwood, the “prescient” Handmaid’s Tale author, who commented that her treatment was “so 17th century,” an apparent reference to the way women were persecuted over alleged witchcraft.

“Was all this because I was a woman?” Clinton asks. “No. But I believe it was motivation for some of those chanters and some of that bile.”

Hillary Clinton has been one of the least admired people in the country for a quarter of a century now. If the level of respect she receives is on the high end for “public servants,” that’s actually pretty encouraging re: how Americans view their rulers.

I’ve been in politics for a long time, but I was taken aback by the flood of hatred that only seemed to grow as we got closer to Election Day.

Utterly clueless. She’s one of the most vilified public figures in recent American history. She’s a long-time nanny-scold and a shameless power-monger. She mocked women who chose to live like traditional wives while enabling her husband’s infidelities and sexual abuse. She exploited public sympathy over the Lewinsky scandal to grab a Senate seat. Her campaign team used Nixon-style dirty tricks on Bernie, her long-time crony at CNN passed her debate questions ahead of time, she still thinks she didn’t do anything wrong with her email server, Libya is now a failed state and a terrorist haven in no small part due to her interference, and she acted as if she was entitled to the Presidency instead of explaining why she deserved the job, taking traditional Democrat strongholds for granted while pandering to the new anti-white animus that now drives the party. Best of all, she continues to refuse to take any accountability for her failures.

Someone here remarked that very few American politicians have failed upward like Hillary has, and she continues to show why every time she opens up her piehole.

Cersei Lannister got and held the Iron Throne via murder, conspiracy, abuse, torture, false accusations, necromancy, sexual perversion, and every other kind of corruption, so of course Hillary thinks she’s the protagonist of the series.

She’s at her most honest when she’s spazzing out about something. She really did believe there was a vast right-wing conspiracy against her, she really did believe that Bernie was lying about what a corrupt bitch she was, and she really does believe that white people are the reason she’s not President.